PHILOLOGOS in The Forward: Cracking the Ugaritic Code: Hebrew and Sister Tongue Grew From Ancient Semitic Language.
The treatment is pretty accurate, but a few comments are in order. First, it is not quite true that the Ugaritic alphabet does not indicate vowels at all. The letter Aleph comes in three forms, each of which attaches a different vowel to the consonant (a, i, or u). Second, it is not clear to me that Yamm or Sea is the same being as Lotan/Leviathan. Yamm is the god of the sea, whereas Leviathan is a sea monster. Third, it should be noted that the Ugaritic phrase quoted in the article appears in Hebrew in almost the same consonantal form in Isaiah 27:1. Finally, Ugaritic does "predate" Hebrew in the sense that it is older than the Hebrew we have in the Hebrew Bible, which (possibly with a rare earlier exception here or there) dates to the Iron Age II (c. 1000-586/7 BCE) and later. But Philologos is correct that Hebrew does not descend from Ugaritic; they are independent branches of Northwest Semitic. Still, whatever ancestor of Hebrew existed in the time of Ugaritic would be rather different from the Hebrew we know from the Bible and it would be a stretch to call it "Hebrew."
